It was just five days ago Donald Trump said, “I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” That was soon dubbed “aspirational” by some, crazy by others. Now with the number of cases continuing to climb, the president is backtracking saying it will actually be another month before guidelines are lifted. During today’s coronavirus briefing, he said:

“You have to follow the guidelines that our great vice president holds up a lot. he’s holding that up a lot. He believes in it so strongly. The better you do, the faster this whole nightmare will end. Therefore, we will be extending our guidelines to April 30th to slow the spread. On Tuesday, we will be finalizing these plans and providing a summary of our findings supporting data and strategy to the American people. So, we’ll be having lots of meetings in between, but we’ll be having a very important statement made on Tuesday, probably Tuesday evening, on all of the findings, all of the data and the reasons we’re doing things the way we’re doing them. We can expect that by June 1st we will be well on our way to recovery, we think by June 1st a lot of great things will be happening.”

And when a reporter asked “was floating Easter a mistake?” Trump actually denied saying the country would re-open that day and also said it was just “aspirational.”

“I didn’t say Easter. I said it would be a great thing if we could do it by Easter, and we know much more now than we knew two or three weeks ago. Easter should be the peak number, and it should start coming down, and hopefully very substantially from that point.”

Note he didn’t make the statements two or three weeks ago, it was actually just five days ago, but now Trump said Easter may actually be the peak of the crisis.

“That could be the peak number of deaths before it starts coming down. No, that was aspirational. We had an aspiration of Easter. but when you hear these kinds of numbers and you hear the potential travesty, we don’t want to do anything where, you know, we don’t want to have a spike up. We don’t want to do it sooner, then all of a sudden, you’re going down, you’re coming down, and then all of a sudden you come up again, because we discussed, that could happen, and we don’t want that to happen. we’ve gone through too much. So, that was an aspirational number.”

I'm glad Trump walked back his idiotic Easter deadline, but all the numbers he's citing as the reason for his retreat were knowable when he gave the country false hope of this ending soon.